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Comment by chrisper | Hacker News Reader

Putting a Threadripper in a homeserver is overkill.

Besides I wanted to replace the i7 920, so that it won't be that hot anymore in that room (130W TDP vs 65W). I think a threadripper would achieve the opposite.

Maybe I should just do seasonal CPUs... Threadripper in Winter and Ryzen in Summer.

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> Putting a Threadripper in a homeserver is overkill.

Running 2 gaming VMs for me and my kids and one ubuntu WS on a 12 core Threadripper. Host is also doing file serving and runs Unifi controller.

One server to rule them all.

If you still have the old motherboard you can buy an old Xeon X56xx and use it as a drop in replacement in the LGA1366 socket. An X5650 for instance cost about $25 on ebay, is clocked at 2.66 GHz like the i7 920, has six cores, a TDP of 95W, and overclocks really well. I don't know if most i7 motherboards support ECC, but the CPU supports it.

The LGA1366 motherboards still fetch some money too, if you'd rather sell it.

For home server/NAS/HTPC you are likely fine with some Atom-based Celeron/Pentium ;-)

But where is the fun in that!

I would say get something a bit more beefy like i3 or i5, as most people will want to run some basic things like Game servers, database or maybe a plex server, and it's good to be able just to run things compared to either rebuilding or renting something in the cloud in a lot of instances.

Latest Gemini Lake is already past the level of Phenom 2/Core 2 but with 10W TDP. They are also faster than Broadwell i3 on the same frequency in single thread (but have no hyperthreading).

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